Data Suggest Symmetry May 'Melt' Along with Protons and Neutrons

Published on February 15, 2010 at 6:22 PM

Scientists at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), a 2.4-mile-circumference
particle accelerator at the U.S.
Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory, report the first
hints of profound symmetry transformations in the hot soup of quarks, antiquarks,
and gluons produced in RHIC's most energetic collisions.

STAR detector

In particular, the new results, reported in the journal Physical Review Letters,
suggest that "bubbles" formed within this hot soup may internally disobey the
so-called "mirror symmetry" that normally characterizes the interactions of
quarks and gluons.

"RHIC's collisions of heavy nuclei at nearly light speed are designed
to re-create, on a tiny scale, the conditions of the early universe. These new
results thus suggest that RHIC may have a unique opportunity to test in the
laboratory some crucial features of symmetry-altering bubbles speculated to
have played important roles in the evolution of the infant universe,"
said Steven Vigdor, Brookhaven's Associate Laboratory Director for Nuclear
and Particle Physics, who oversees research at RHIC.

Physicists have predicted an increasing probability of finding such bubbles,
or local regions, of "broken" symmetry at extreme temperatures near
transitions from one phase of matter to another. According to the predictions,
the matter inside these bubbles would exhibit different symmetries — or
behavior under certain simple transformations of space, time, and particle types
— than the surrounding matter. In addition to the symmetry violations
probed at RHIC, scientists have postulated that analogous symmetry-altering
bubbles created at an even earlier time in the universe helped to establish
the preference for matter over antimatter in our world.

RHIC's most energetic collisions create the kind of extreme conditions
that might be just right for producing such local regions of altered symmetry:
A temperature of several trillion degrees Celsius, or about 250,000* times hotter
than the center of the Sun, and a transition to a new phase of nuclear matter
known as quark-gluon plasma. Furthermore, as the colliding nuclei pass near
each other, they produce an ultra-strong magnetic field that facilitates detecting
effects of the altered symmetry.

Now, early data from RHIC's STAR detector hint at a violation in what
is known as mirror symmetry, or parity. This rule of symmetry suggests that
events should occur in exactly the same way whether seen directly or in a mirror,
with no directional dependence. But STAR has observed an asymmetric charge separation
in particles emerging from all but the most head-on collisions at RHIC: The
observations suggest that positively charged quarks may prefer to emerge parallel
to the magnetic field in a given collision event, while negatively charged quarks
prefer to emerge in the opposite direction. Because this preference would appear
reversed if the situation were reflected through a mirror, it appears to violate
mirror symmetry.

"In all previous studies of systems governed by the strong force among
quarks and gluons, it has been found to very high precision that events and
their mirror reflections occur at exactly the same rate, with no directional
dependence," Vigdor said. "So this observation at STAR is truly
intriguing."

At RHIC, the parity-violating bubbles are formed in a random way, possibly
with oppositely oriented charge separation in bubbles at different locations.
Averaged over many events there would appear to be no parity violation, even
though there were violations locally in each event. Although allowed by quantum
chromodynamics (QCD), the underlying theory that describes the strong nuclear
force, such local strong parity violation has never been detected directly.

"The key to observing the effect in high-energy nuclear collisions is
to study correlations among the particles emerging from the collision,"
said Nu Xu of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the spokesperson for the
STAR collaboration.

The theory suggests that particles with the same sign of electric charge should
tend to be emitted from such local parity-violating regions in the same direction,
either both parallel, or both anti-parallel, to the magnetic field arising in
the collision, whereas unlike-sign particles should be emitted in opposite directions.

"We have observed a correlation among emitted charged particles of the
predicted type, with the degree of directional preference increasing as the
collisions vary from head-on to more grazing," Xu said.

STAR data also suggest the local breaking of another form of symmetry, known
as charge-parity, or CP, invariance. According to this fundamental physics principle,
when energy is converted to mass or vice-versa according to Einstein's
famous E=mc2 equation, equal numbers of particles and oppositely charged antiparticles
must be created or annihilated. If CP symmetry had not been broken at some very
early time in the evolution of our universe, the particles and antiparticles
created in equal numbers in the Big Bang would subsequently have annihilated
one another in pairs, leaving no matter to form the stars, planets, and people
that now populate our world.

While some small violations of CP symmetry have been found in previous laboratory
experiments, those violations are far too weak to account for the amount of
matter remaining in the universe today. Likewise, the signs of possible local
CP violation at STAR cannot explain the global predominance of matter in today's
world, but they may offer insight into how such symmetry violations occur.

"The features observed at STAR are qualitatively consistent with predictions
of symmetry-breaking domains in hot quark matter," said Vigdor. "Confirmation
of this effect and understanding how these domains of broken symmetry form at
RHIC may help scientists understand some of the most fundamental puzzles of
the universe, and will be a subject of intense study in future RHIC experiments."

"For example," he said, "we will want to see if the signal
disappears, as predicted, at lower collision energies, where the produced matter
is no longer hot enough to make the transition to the quark-gluon plasma phase.
These future studies will further check the early work, will test more mundane
possible explanations for the observed effects, and will explore a wide range
of related phenomena."